1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:14,240 This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 399 for Thursday the 27th of July 2023. 2 00:00:14,240 --> 00:00:18,520 Today's show is entitled, Permission tickets. 3 00:00:18,520 --> 00:00:22,960 It is hosted by one of spools and is about 11 minutes long. 4 00:00:22,960 --> 00:00:25,760 It carries an explicit flag. 5 00:00:25,760 --> 00:00:40,760 The summary is, collective delusions of elective conclusions. 6 00:00:40,760 --> 00:00:43,640 Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is one of spools. 7 00:00:43,640 --> 00:00:48,160 I've had several non-finished episodes in a directory for more than a year. 8 00:00:48,160 --> 00:00:52,960 Nevertheless, I thought I might be able to stitch together a preview. 9 00:00:52,960 --> 00:00:59,680 I would prefer to submit a more comprehensive episode, but I haven't, for such a long time, 10 00:00:59,680 --> 00:01:03,360 I think I should just contribute something to the conversation. 11 00:01:03,360 --> 00:01:07,200 So briefly, from my perspective, money is permission. 12 00:01:07,200 --> 00:01:14,280 You can work very hard and get none at all because the people who are controlling it. 13 00:01:14,280 --> 00:01:19,760 Issuing it, issuing that currency, do not value or want to strongly discourage whatever 14 00:01:19,760 --> 00:01:23,360 behavior it was that you were expressing. 15 00:01:23,360 --> 00:01:30,000 One of the main problems of money, along with many other social concepts, is that people are using 16 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:37,440 the same words to describe very different relationships and the confusion is not resolved 17 00:01:37,440 --> 00:01:44,680 and is deliberately used to gain advantage or maintain power structures in the interests of those 18 00:01:44,680 --> 00:01:46,160 of the powerful. 19 00:01:46,160 --> 00:01:53,320 Because it is so contentious, it deserves a thorough definition and discussion. 20 00:01:53,320 --> 00:01:55,600 So I won't try to do that here. 21 00:01:55,600 --> 00:02:04,320 What I can discuss is an implementation and the various applications of a non-mutable 22 00:02:04,320 --> 00:02:11,960 ledger that is a distributed database which, once written to, is not altered, you can 23 00:02:11,960 --> 00:02:12,960 append to it. 24 00:02:12,960 --> 00:02:20,800 In fact, I imagine you can alter the way it's represented, but the state is non-mutable. 25 00:02:20,800 --> 00:02:29,720 I will also attempt to be non-lazy in relation to words like cryptocurrency and cryptography. 26 00:02:29,720 --> 00:02:32,960 Energy costs are rising across Europe. 27 00:02:32,960 --> 00:02:37,560 The cost of the customer at any rate and this will get back to it later I suppose it's 28 00:02:37,560 --> 00:02:46,200 part of a tokenisation and the economy, the naming of the factors which are involved in our 29 00:02:46,200 --> 00:02:47,480 day-to-day lives. 30 00:02:47,480 --> 00:02:55,360 I suppose before you switch off, I should clarify one opinion or one observation about cryptographic 31 00:02:55,360 --> 00:03:03,120 tokens and the lengths that people will go to get them or what they're willing to gamble 32 00:03:03,200 --> 00:03:10,840 to hold these tokens in the hope that they might gain some advantage over their fellows. 33 00:03:10,840 --> 00:03:16,000 Or difficult to pry the two things apart but, well, very easy actually. 34 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:22,520 So your network and all of its capabilities, all of the transactional functions, all of 35 00:03:22,520 --> 00:03:30,160 the pointers that you can store and the things to which you can point and the interactions 36 00:03:30,240 --> 00:03:37,160 between these tokens and how they can act as functions upon each other, all of that ordinary 37 00:03:37,160 --> 00:03:42,960 computational and ledger-based memory-based stuff. 38 00:03:42,960 --> 00:03:48,840 We'll all work regardless of the market price of the token. 39 00:03:48,840 --> 00:03:55,720 So it's difficult for me to say market price of the token but people do obtain these tokens 40 00:03:55,760 --> 00:03:56,720 with money. 41 00:03:56,720 --> 00:04:02,400 I mean, you can also obtain them by arrangement, just the same as any other token. 42 00:04:02,400 --> 00:04:05,640 Most of the tokens certainly national currencies. 43 00:04:05,640 --> 00:04:12,720 What I'm trying to say is if you want to use a token as a means of recording a transaction 44 00:04:12,720 --> 00:04:19,440 where you change one currency into Bitcoin and send the Bitcoin to the other side of the 45 00:04:19,440 --> 00:04:25,160 world in 10 seconds and then the person on the other side transfers exchanges that 46 00:04:25,200 --> 00:04:30,240 Bitcoin back into some national currency, then what have they lost? 47 00:04:30,240 --> 00:04:33,000 What's the volatility across 10 seconds? 48 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:34,240 Not very much, really. 49 00:04:34,240 --> 00:04:40,440 And it would literally be limited by how many transactions could transpire and so the 50 00:04:40,440 --> 00:04:46,160 point is, you, as long as you're only buying the tokens you need or obtaining the tokens 51 00:04:46,160 --> 00:04:49,200 you need, then you're not losing anything. 52 00:04:49,200 --> 00:04:52,080 You don't hold a cryptocurrency. 53 00:04:52,120 --> 00:04:54,760 You don't need to hold it to use the token. 54 00:04:54,760 --> 00:05:01,120 You use the token for its purpose or you buy, you exchange something, you obtain a token 55 00:05:01,120 --> 00:05:02,120 and then you use it. 56 00:05:02,120 --> 00:05:07,600 You don't need to buy 10,000 tokens for half of your house, then don't do that. 57 00:05:07,600 --> 00:05:11,960 If you just trying to send somebody a message, it's going to cost you six pence. 58 00:05:11,960 --> 00:05:19,360 So enough said, also you shouldn't worry that if the market price of some token falls 59 00:05:19,360 --> 00:05:25,200 to their floor, whether that's a penny or whatever, your network still works. 60 00:05:25,200 --> 00:05:29,000 You can still do everything that you could before, except now maybe you've got access 61 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:34,720 to, well, approaching as close as it approaches to zero, the closer to infinite number 62 00:05:34,720 --> 00:05:37,880 of tokens you have, but it still works. 63 00:05:37,880 --> 00:05:45,080 So the, I mean, half of the point of things like file coin or certain aspects of why 64 00:05:45,080 --> 00:05:52,080 people find cryptocurrency interesting is that maybe you will find the price where, like 65 00:05:52,080 --> 00:05:58,200 a fair price, the price for energy, combined with the price for people's time, combined 66 00:05:58,200 --> 00:06:03,000 with the fair price for maintaining equipment, all of that are bundled in. 67 00:06:03,000 --> 00:06:08,040 So when you're buying tokens, you're paying for what you've used and that would be, it 68 00:06:08,040 --> 00:06:14,040 would be in a better place if we knew how many resources we had available for which tasks 69 00:06:14,040 --> 00:06:19,080 because then perhaps we could not expend the planet, the other five planets, which we 70 00:06:19,080 --> 00:06:20,080 don't have. 71 00:06:20,080 --> 00:06:26,520 An application of a ledger, there are various schemes notably in the UK, the Bristol 72 00:06:26,520 --> 00:06:27,520 Pound. 73 00:06:27,520 --> 00:06:33,760 There was also the let's scheme, and I've heard of time sharing, where people recognized 74 00:06:33,760 --> 00:06:38,760 that they were all capable of working and had all the things they needed to, to work 75 00:06:38,760 --> 00:06:43,360 a job if they had an employer who could give them money. 76 00:06:43,360 --> 00:06:48,040 And they would do exactly the same things for the employer as they could do to each other. 77 00:06:48,040 --> 00:06:54,000 So they recognized they could just do all these things for each other and use their own 78 00:06:54,000 --> 00:07:00,280 currency, so long as they asked for the same prices, they just mimicked being paid. 79 00:07:00,280 --> 00:07:06,720 And then sort of I'll use to each other and there's the issue, the issue is a trust. 80 00:07:06,720 --> 00:07:13,400 So you can use C-shelves to record how much work one person has done for another, but 81 00:07:13,400 --> 00:07:18,960 someone goes to the beach and picks up some C-shelves, the count of it, tokens. 82 00:07:18,960 --> 00:07:25,360 So rather than telephone the plumber to see if they fix the taps for the hairdresser, 83 00:07:25,360 --> 00:07:32,520 so that the hairdresser can buy some groceries from the shopkeeper, you know, you can make 84 00:07:32,560 --> 00:07:39,840 your own tokens and record them in this ledger, which is maintained by thousands of people 85 00:07:39,840 --> 00:07:41,400 across the planet. 86 00:07:41,400 --> 00:07:46,040 And you know, there's only one place to get those tokens because they're a cryptographic 87 00:07:46,040 --> 00:07:47,040 object. 88 00:07:47,040 --> 00:07:51,000 They were issued, you were all present when they were issued, something like that. 89 00:07:51,000 --> 00:07:56,840 So you know that if anybody has got them from anybody else, then they obtained them in 90 00:07:56,840 --> 00:08:00,760 the same way they would obtain ordinary national currency. 91 00:08:00,760 --> 00:08:06,840 You can't stop people giving gifts of that currency, or you know, taking another service, 92 00:08:06,840 --> 00:08:13,840 or even buying some ridiculous piece of artwork or sculpture from somebody for half of the 93 00:08:13,840 --> 00:08:14,840 currency. 94 00:08:14,840 --> 00:08:22,720 And you can't stop people from buying your minted currency, your personal currency with currency 95 00:08:22,720 --> 00:08:23,720 of a state. 96 00:08:23,720 --> 00:08:31,000 So someone could buy ten Bristol pounds for ten United Kingdom Great British pounds. 97 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:37,920 It's the same as using ordinary money in an ordinary bank. 98 00:08:37,920 --> 00:08:43,840 The difference is people who couldn't get a bank account, or people who couldn't get 99 00:08:43,840 --> 00:08:50,360 a national currency can now have their very own bank account and their very own currency. 100 00:08:50,360 --> 00:08:56,280 More of course, people on the other side of the world could agree with other very 101 00:08:56,280 --> 00:09:03,840 ously distributed people to provide financial backing in various other national currencies 102 00:09:03,840 --> 00:09:07,480 for people who agree to use this token. 103 00:09:07,480 --> 00:09:13,320 I'm afraid the money schema will continue to haunt us, but I'm going to re-abstract 104 00:09:13,360 --> 00:09:16,520 back to a cryptographic ledger. 105 00:09:16,520 --> 00:09:22,280 I will outline key derivation and then leave it until next time. 106 00:09:22,280 --> 00:09:25,840 I will mention UTXOs and scripts. 107 00:09:25,840 --> 00:09:33,840 They are unspent transaction outputs and lists of instructions which are specific to 108 00:09:33,840 --> 00:09:38,200 a particular application of a cryptographic ledger. 109 00:09:38,200 --> 00:09:41,640 Let's try to describe the structure. 110 00:09:41,680 --> 00:09:47,560 You generate, here's a procedure, you would generate a seed phrase, so you can choose 111 00:09:47,560 --> 00:09:55,240 a seed phrase from I think, 2048 different words, it's a word list, and you choose, say, 112 00:09:55,240 --> 00:10:01,800 24 words, they can be not any of these words because there's a checksum function. 113 00:10:01,800 --> 00:10:09,720 So I think one out of 256 of the possible immense number of possibilities are valid 114 00:10:09,720 --> 00:10:15,320 seed phrases, and then feed this seed phrase into a function which will give you a root 115 00:10:15,320 --> 00:10:18,920 private key for a wallet they call it. 116 00:10:18,920 --> 00:10:22,560 It's a basically you've got a root private key, haven't you? 117 00:10:22,560 --> 00:10:28,360 That's the artifact which exists after you've passed the seed phrase into the function. 118 00:10:28,360 --> 00:10:35,080 And from that root private key are derived, all of the many other keys, private keys and 119 00:10:35,120 --> 00:10:43,960 public keys, verification keys, signing keys, and then from those keys are derived addresses. 120 00:10:43,960 --> 00:10:50,840 First glance when you might think the addresses come first and then the keys are generated 121 00:10:50,840 --> 00:10:58,320 from those, but no, start with a key which makes sense because you'd have a very full blockchain 122 00:10:58,400 --> 00:11:04,400 already if you had a fantastic number of addresses ready to use. 123 00:11:04,400 --> 00:11:11,280 You just one might never need any of those addresses, there are a result of a function which 124 00:11:11,280 --> 00:11:20,320 iterates many, many times upon a key set and then generates an address. 125 00:11:20,320 --> 00:11:24,400 They then exist on the ledger, those addresses you can search for them, and if they exist 126 00:11:24,480 --> 00:11:31,120 you can find them and you can query what stored at that address, there'll be an index of UTXOs. 127 00:11:31,120 --> 00:11:37,920 addresses can also resolve two scripts. So as a disclaimer, if it wasn't clear at the beginning, 128 00:11:37,920 --> 00:11:44,800 if you recognize that someone who exchanges a bunch of money for a bunch of cryptographic tokens 129 00:11:44,800 --> 00:11:50,240 is essentially holding next to the thing at all, then your halfway to recognizing that someone 130 00:11:50,880 --> 00:11:57,200 holds a bunch of money is holding next to nothing at all, what they need is to convince somebody 131 00:11:57,200 --> 00:12:02,960 to exchange or to swap for the permission tickets which they have acquired. 132 00:12:03,520 --> 00:12:08,800 Goodbye Hacker Public Radio, I hope wasn't too dull, choose well and keep well. 133 00:12:11,520 --> 00:12:16,480 You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org. 134 00:12:16,480 --> 00:12:22,480 Today's show was contributed by a HBR this night like yourself. 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